Jack Palance in a scene from City Slickers. (AP)

Los Angeles, Nov. 11 (Reuters): Oscar-winning actor Jack Palance, one of Hollywood’s best-known screen villains who personified evil as a cold-blooded gunslinger in the classic western Shane, died yesterday at the age of 87, his spokesman said.

Palance, who later won an Oscar for the comedy City Slickers and famously brought down the house by performing one-armed push-ups on the stage, died of natural causes, spokesman Dick Guttman said.

Though he had dozens of film and TV parts, Palance’s gaunt features, raspy voice and squinty eyes were perfect for menacing roles and he often played dangerous characters.

He was nominated for Oscars as the beady-eyed hired gun who is shot down by Alan Ladd’s title character in Shane and for 1952’s Sudden Fear, in which he starred opposite Joan Crawford as a man plotting to kill his wife.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1919, Palance was a professional boxer who injured his throat in a fight, leaving him with his signature raspy voice, before serving in World War II. The son of Ukrainian immigrants, his birth name was Vladimir Palahnuik, variously spelled as Palahniuk or Palaniuk.

After the war Palance moved to New York and served as Marlon Brando’s understudy for the classic Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He made his screen debut in the 1950 Elia Kazan film Panic in the Streets.

Shane, with its beautiful cinematography of bleak landscapes and themes of good versus evil, is considered one of Hollywood’s greatest Westerns.

Ladd stars as a vaguely mysterious former gunslinger who tries to settle down with a steady family but is forced into a showdown with the hired gun played by Palance.